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Tuesday, 4 November 2014

Calvin Harris - Motion

The one thing Calvin Harris has going for him is
foresight. By naming his last album ’18 months’
– roughly the amount of time the album was in popular circulation – he’s either a
fortune teller, or he created an album of annoyingly infectious hooks. It spawned nine top ten singles (the first
album in history to do so, surpassing Michael Jackson of all people), has seen
success on both sides of the Atlantic, and helped make Harris the highest paid DJ of the last couple of years (even if that’s probably more from production
than actual DJing gigs). It’s an
unprecedented (some would say unworthy) level of success.

What Calvin Harris doesn’t have is innovation. At all.
If David Guetta is largely attributed to the demise of pop music with popularising
EDM, then Calvin Harris is his perpetuator.
Everything on ‘Motion’ has been heard before. Love
Now for instance is an unashamed copy of Clean Bandit, incorporating
melodic strings with a clipped beat, whilst Slow
Acid is a poor attempt to capture Daft Punk circa their Tron soundtrack. Tracks like Faith and Summer, without
featured vocalists, are the same old Harris trite: loud, synthy, wobbly and
with as much melodic variety as a bleating alarm clock after a late night of
alcohol induced pill-popping in some trashy Essex club. Expect to hear most of ‘Motion’ on TOWIE
soon.

Even the collaborators can’t escape the inevitable Harris ‘banger’
chorus. Ellie Goulding has no excuse,
considering she’s already duetted with Harris on I Need Your Love; here, Outside
is essentially the same track with a different title. Hurts, after the failure of their own second
album, are silly enough to feature on two tracks – previous release Under Control and Ecstasy, a song that stands out for its complete lack of drums and
provides the perfect opportunity for a mid-album snooze. For rank lyrics, look no further than Big
Sean collaboration Open Wide as he
questions “open that sh*t wide, let me see how big your mouth is” (annoyingly
it probably has the best verse production).
As for female vocalists, Harris has recruited some of the best, but
smothers them with his own ‘style’. Gwen
Stefani should know better than singing on Together;
Tinashé provides some soul on the otherwise soulless Dollar Signs (no irony in that title at all); and Haim’s guitars
are wasted on Pray to God.

Each of these tracks follows the same structure: evocative
verse, pre-chorus build-up, bass drop, EDM wobble. This is taken to extreme on tracks like It Was You and Overdrive – tracks that were made for the club rather than the
charts, albeit a really sh*t one.

‘Motion’ is generic. ‘Motion’
is uninventive. ‘Motion’ scrapes the
barrel to such an extent the barrel has been torn apart, its contents left in a
messy indistinguishable heap on the floor that looks like dried vomit on the
streets of Kavos after a particularly heavy episode of ‘Sun, Sex and Suspicious
Parents’. You'd be better off listening to the new Guetta album later this month. Even Avicii is better.

If this ends up delivering number one singles for the next
eighteen months, we might as well all just pack up and go home.